Well, son, you tried and you failed. The lesson is, never try.
Published by Kyso Kisaen June 21st, 2007 in Politics, Shame on you for not being rich white and privileged, SoapboxThe New York Times ran a sympathetic article on “freegans” - hardcore anti-consumerist dumpster divers. Lots of pictures of fun young people scavanging perfectly good shit in the dumpsters by NYU after the affluent students toss things (like working iPods and television sets) rather than move them at the end of the semester. Their message is pretty straightfoward:
Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.
“Our society throws out so much shit that I don’t see why I should have to pay for anything” is a pretty bold statement, but these guys can back it up:
“This is how I got my futon, chair, table, shelves. And I’m not talking about beat-up stuff. I mean it’s not Design Within Reach, but it’s nice.”
They have some really impressive stories (including several people who switched from upper-middle class life (read: spending) styles to a freegan life) and a leader of sorts who sets the bar for political purity:
“If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.
Of course, the question is, how much can you absent yourself from capitalism, and like patriarchy, so sorry but you can’t. These guys kind of get that:
Not buying any new manufactured products while living in the United States is, of course, basically impossible, as is avoiding everything that requires natural resources to create, distribute or operate. Don’t freegans use gas or electricity to cook, for example, or commercial products to brush their teeth?
“Once in a while I may buy a box of baking soda for toothpaste,” Mr. Weissman said. “And, sure, getting that to market has negative impacts, like everything.” But, he said, parsing the point, a box of baking soda is more ecologically friendly than a tube of toothpaste, because its cardboard container is biodegradable.
These contradictions and others have led some people to suggest that freegans are hypocritical, making use of the capitalist system even as they rail against it. And even Mr. Weissman, who is often doctrinaire about the movement, acknowledges when pushed that absolute freeganism is an impossible dream.
Mr. Torres said: “I think there’s a conscious recognition among freegans that you can never live perfectly.” He added that generally freegans “try to reduce the impact.”
So of course cue the accusations of hypocrisy! Damn those dirty hippies! With their long hair and expired canned goods and reluctant, carefully considered participation in an inescapable system! If Lord Wiessman of the Manor can brush his teeth with baking soda then I don’t see why I can’t throw away entire rooms worth of furniture just because I’m sick of “champaigne” and wish to have a “sand” theme.
Of course the reduction of this philosophy to a battle of extremes is just a ploy for critics to assuage their guilt over ignoring the fact that these guys have a really good point, and if Madaline Nelson can quit her corporate job, move into a less luxurious house and start working for free just because she’s freegan, than maybe you can at least sort out stuff to give to the local goodwill before throwing it out or work to reduce your own trash production. Most of us do a modified form of this already simply because it’s more economical to check the classifieds for good deals before buying new, or searching the thrift store before heading to Target. The reason we don’t do more of this is because living the freegan lifestyle, even the modified lazy-ass freegan lifestyle, is fucking time consuming even for those fortunate enough to live where wealthy people throw away usable stuff. Out here in the boondocks, a lifestyle like that would consume your every waking moment. It could take months to furnish a single room. These people are dedicated.
I like this criticism the best: “These contradictions and others have led some people to suggest that freegans are hypocritical, making use of the capitalist system even as they rail against it.”
Well, duh. Even Madaline Nelson is going to have to pay the taxes on that house she owns, and wear clothing if she doesn’t want to waste all her activist time defending herself against yet another indecent exposure charge. A lot of these freegans either have to produce something for the machine or have to live with someone else who is willing to do that dirty work - freegans, like feminists, will often find themselves having to compromise to get along. The only way to really absent yourself from the capitalist system is to squat illegally on land with enough room to do some sustinence farming and make sure it’s in a warm area because you’ll be wearing fig leaves.
And don’t forget it’s completely lame to subvert a system like capitalism by getting something for nothing; could they have dreamed of a less appropriate form of anti-capitalist protest? Like, they can only protest against consumer waste because they live in a place where the many consumers waste a lot so they should thank the wasteful people for giving them something to protest by not complaining about all that waste they benefit from. If people weren’t so wasteful, then the freegans wouldn’t be necessary, which means they should just shut up. So as you can see, the whole idea of a ‘freegan’ is silly. QED.
As you pointed out, the fundamental problem with this is that there can be no true individual solution to systemic problems.
As you point out, even if one managed to become an independent self-supporting peasant, that does nothing about the continuing existence of capitalism itself. Nevermind that the reproduction of capitalist social relations is in fact predicated on denying people any alternative to wage-labor to feed themselves.
The only way to truly escape capitalism is to replace it.
I’ve decided to go freegan, starting right n
Dear Punkasses!
I’m asking bloggers around the country if they’d care to post their thoughts on this:
“What is torture, and is it necessarily immoral?”
I hope to link to all the responsive posts. Hope you’ll consider joining in the conversation!
We are only pure of thought and action if we go back to the caves. And if we’re not willing to do that, we might as well belly up to the capitalist smorgasbord. There simply is no middle ground on this. If you ain’t got someone under your thumb, you ain’t got shit.
USA! USA!
See, the thing is socialist me, who hates capitalism, does think it would work IF one could actually absent oneself from it. If there was no chance, whatsoever, that you could go homeless, hungry, or sick. I’ve mentioned it a couple times (and I should probably some day expound on it) about urban dorms: housing that is more than a bed in a huge room, but buildings built modeled after dorms on colleges. You could live there if you lost a job, or couldn’t afford a house right now, or whatever. There would be on-site job training, and cafeteria-style food served three times a day. It wouldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination be the lap of luxury, but it would be clean, private, and a place to stay for awhile. Then, you could use capitalism for everything else (except health care) because it would be more of free option to use it: a nicer house, nicer clothes, nicer food, whatever. Capitalism would be if you wanted it: you would legitimately have the right to say “I don’t want to work for an asshole at a crappy job unless I’m really compensated for it”.
Also, there would have to be steps in place to make sure this isn’t the kind of thing they could underfund to death. That it wouldn’t be a roach motel, or something like that.
Good for them! I know I haven’t paid retail price for any clothes whatsoever as long as I’ve been paying for them myself (so since I was about 16). I either make them myself (I taught myself how to sew when I saw how RIDICULOUSLY priced clothes were), get them at thrift stores, or hit up the 75% off rack at department stores (I got the softest, warmest, cutest bathrobe EVER for $5!). My boyfriend found our solid oak dresser on the street, and that is where we also found our super comfy, perfect-sized couch! Not only is it a “good” thing to do, but for us it’s pretty necessary–we live in Santa Cruz, where it costs $975 a month to rent a small studio, so there is hardly ANY money left over for full-priced things. I often visit the library (in addition to all the stuff they have to check out, they have a 50 cent book sale! TONS of great stuff) for several weeks’ worth of entertainment–all for free or a dollar or two.
This also got covered recently in the London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n10/ohag01_.html) and I think there they (the Freegans) gave the game away even more by larding it with a cut-rate ’sprituality’ .
I speak as some one who has lived like this a lot, who grew up, even, with the notion that thrown out shop food was perfectly acceptable (I’ve never known my mother, who is now in her 60’s and no hippy, to refuse it) but I did it because I had very little money, not because I believed it made me somehow morally superior. And I very much like being able to buy and eat fresh food.
Poverty sucks, it doesn’t make you more spiritual or enlightened, there are no great lessons to be learned just what you have to do to survive.
Um, perhaps not hypocritical, but naive. Aren’t ‘freegans’ still relying on a capitalist system to generate the stuff they find?
Kevin, you kind of missed the point of my criticism of that criticism. Yeah, without a bloated capitalist system that hinges on massive consumer waste, freegans would not be able to build shabby yet comfortable lives out of consumer waste. But if the consumers didn’t waste as much as they did, then the freegans would more than likely be living in a system that they could participate in. They’d probably be protesting something else, sure.
I personally don’t think capitalism is particularly moral or immoral, but our current version emphasizes waste and I don’t think it’s wrong of them to chose to live like this, or use this method to draw the rest of our attention to the problem. I also don’t think it’s a massive sin to actually give in occasionally and buy basic things like baking soda. Obviously the act of purchasing something isn’t wrong, it’s just the waste. If you use a $500 TV, then it is not a waste and there’s really no ethical dilemma there. If you buy a $1,000 TV and throw the old yet working $500 TV in the trash rather than give it away or recycle it, then that’s waste bordering on crime, and it’s that sort of waste that allows these guys to live like that.
If I lived in a neighborhood that was famous among dumpster divers as being a place where perfectly good shit was being thrown away, I’d re-evaluate my consumption habits a bit if only to get rid of kids going through my trash.
I wish I’d gotten to this post earlier– a friend sent me that article, as I, too, have been known to eat out of dumpsters. But the freegans in this piece are so deluded I nearly screamed.
Kyso called them out on the impossibility of ‘absenting oneself from capitalism,’ but I’d like to take that a little further. These people see dumpstering as a revolutionary act in and of itself. How, I don’t know. It provides NO challenge to capitalism. It is, in fact, parasitic on capitalism. Their way of life could not exist without capitalism. Rather than focusing their energies on creating the infrastructure of a new society, they’re content to louse off of the current one and think they’re making some great contribution.
I’m sick of this poverty chic shit coming from kids who don’t work and live with their parents. Not everyone has that option, Mr. Weissman. And I was maddened beyond belief with Madeline Nelson, who ‘gave up’ her middle class life, bought a house and does pro-bono paralegal work for activists. Not everyone can stop working and buy a house to devote themselves to full-time activism. These words actually escape her mouth: ‘It’s always hard to give up class privilege.’ YOU, MS. NELSON, ARE FLAGRANTLY EXERCISING YOUR CLASS PRIVILEGE BY LEADING THE EXISTENCE YOU DO.
My friends and I dumpster because we usually can’t afford food, clothes and whatever other treasures we find. Poor and homeless people were dumpstering long before privileged white kids. Dumpstering, like shoplifting, is a survival skill. It is not revolutionary.
At this point, I’d like to make it clear that I agree with all commenters who see the freegans as holier-than-thou psuedo-revolutionaries. The fact they the NYT profiled freegans appear to be mostly privileged assholes (and really, does anyone expect any less from NYT? Let us all consider the source) does not mitigate the lesson we should all be drawing from this, which is that the people generating the waste that let’s these guys do this ought to be smacked.
I can’t believe that nobody has taken any notice that the spokesperson for this “movement” and operator of the freegan website lives with his frickin parents!
“But New York City in particular — the financial capital of the world’s richest country — has emerged as a hub of freegan activity, thanks largely to Mr. Weissman’s zeal for the cause and the considerable free time he has to devote to it. (He doesn’t work and lives at home in Teaneck, N.J., with his father and elderly grandparents.)”
I mean, the guy who is running the site lives with his parents who no doubt put clothes on his back and a roof over his head in addition to paying for him to surf the web for free stuff and operate that site. The point being, he’s still contributing to corprate blah blah blah by using the effin’ computer and interweb. He probably spends the rest of his free time in front of their TV and then justifies it b/c they were watching Wheel of Fortune anyway!
Oh come on, this is dumb. Okay, so they’re not destroying capitalism, so that makes them worse that the biggest, most wasteful consumer out there? The fact is, we do live in a disposable society, consumer producs are not built to last, and most people would rather buy something new than fix what they already have. Consumer waste is out of control, and if these people are trying to reuse and recycle, good for them.
I mean, yes, Ms. nelson may be self righteous, but what’s the alternative? “How dare you exercise your class privilege by being a full time activist!!!!! You’re not revolutionary–Go back to the corporate wor;d and screw homeless people and beat up on unions!!!! Unless you can destroy capitalism single handedly, go work for Bush!!!”
I’ve known people who work and are freegans. It’s not limited to those who can rely on parents, and it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. I don’t have a problem with people reducing excess waste, even though it won’t drastically change the world, and for all some of them might be self-righteous.
(As a trivial aside, one of them did tell me that some supermarkets (Tesco) will pour white emulsion over their rubbish rather than let people steal and use it.)
‘I can’t believe that nobody has taken any notice that the spokesperson for this “movement” and operator of the freegan website lives with his frickin parents!’
Actually, if you’d read my comment, you’d have seen that I did point that out.
‘Ms. nelson may be self righteous, but what’s the alternative?’
Oh, lordy. I’m not saying that she shouldn’t be a full time activist, it would just be nice if she acknowledged that she was using her privilege to do her activism rather than assert that she was doing her activism in spite of it.
I will never call myself a freegan after that article. While it’s true that I get food/fun/stuff out of dumpsters [and have even been known to make out in dumpsters], I don’t see it as a solution, as the NYT folx seem to, but as a supplement to the the low-impact life I try to lead.
And yes, I have to work for a living.
Nothing wrong with living with one’s parents, if everyone involved is happy with the situation. In fact, the nuclear family is one of the many many elements that contribute to the consumerism run amok that these folks are acting in relation to.
did anyone else see colbert’s take on this last night? thought it was pretty hysterical.
i don’t know. i’m sympathetic. it is true that they aren’t shunning capitalism so much as leeching off of it. but then again, what AM I DOING to make the world a better place? what are ANY of us doing besides bitching and finding fault in others?
Well, Jason, a great many people are involved in social justice activism, organizing, and building a new society in the shell of the old. Just cuz you don’t do shit doesn’t mean that no one is. In fact, the U.S. Social Forum is taking place as we speak.
It’s true that I bitch a lot and find fault in others, but I’m into accountability… and this post by Marc from a zillion years ago.
http://punkassblog.com/2006/06/18/infighting-keeps-us-honest/